Life in the Scriptures has a new format that will spend a Year in the New Testament, in a book-by-book journey reading one chapter per day. This approach enables busy people to have daily Bible readings, and to increase their familiarity with the people, places, and teachings of the New Testament. It is a profitable and helpful Bible study method. May God bless it to you.

December 29, 2013

Galatians 4 uses
an unusual word to describe time. We
don’t notice it very much because we are accustomed to hearing it. But if it were not in the Bible and someone
were to use it today as a new phrase, like “re-gifting” or “unfriending” we
would notice its distinctiveness immediately.
That word is fulness. It is unusual because we don’t usually think of
time as having fulness. To us time simply
is. Our schedules may have fulness,
especially at this time of year when families and friends are coming and going
and events are still happening and in the planning stage. But time is different from our schedules, and
it is neither full nor empty, it just is.

Yet the Bible
talks about the fulness of time, as though time were something that can be
poured into a container, and when the container is full, a certain event will
occur. I vaguely remember a pop song that said, “If I could save time in a bottle.” Well, God can, and the picture here is of God
pouring time into a bottle until it reaches its fullness, and then something He
has been planning happens. A similar
picture is found in Luke 2:6. You
remember the words there, referring to Mary in Bethlehem, saying the time was “accomplished”
that she should be delivered.
“Accomplished” in the Greek New Testament, is from the same word
translated “fulness” in Galatians 4. We
understand Luke’s meaning. The baby has
developed and matured in the womb and is now ready to be born. The task of growing inside the womb has been
accomplished and fulfilled, and the time to come out and face the world has
arrived. The time is accomplished. So the “fulness of time” means that a time of
preparation is accomplished, and an event is ready to take place, the Messiah
is ready to be sent into the world.

Remember that
image of God pouring time in a bottle until is reaches its perfect
fullness. Remember it because it shows
that the birth of Christ is not an accident.
It is the culmination of a time of preparation, which is itself the
enacting of a plan and a purpose. We are
familiar with many of the Old Testament verses that tell of the coming
Messiah. They cover the entire Old
Testament, beginning with the book of Genesis.
Remember the words of God to the serpent regarding the seed of the
woman, “it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Man had
fallen into sin, into all the sorrow and loneliness and personal and cultural
disintegration and distorted ways of thinking and acting that we call the
misery of sin. Yet God is promising even
at that point, that One will come who will begin to put the world, and us,
right again. He will bruise the
serpent’s head.

As we look
through the Old Testament we see God continuing to fill the bottle. We see Him call Abraham to found a family for
God. We see him rescue His family from Egypt. We see Him give His family rules of conduct
that enable its people to live together in peace and respect. We see Him establish the great feasts, which
are like family gatherings and Christmas dinners. And He calls them together for the more
ordinary things of family life, like worshiping together on the Sabbath. He gives them wise family sages to help them
negotiate the trials and stages of life.
He gives them family historians to record their pilgrimage and remind
them who they are and remind them of the family traditions and their meaning
and importance. In all of these things God
is their Father, the head of the family, the leader provider and
protector. As long as the family stays
with Him they live in prosperity and happiness.
When they stray from Him they find that the serpent still lurks under
rocks and fallen trees, and his bite is still deadly.

And what did the
children of Israel
do? They ran away from home. Instead of a loving Father, they imagined God
as a self-serving tyrant. Instead of
seeing His laws as a protective fence they imagined them as oppressive prison
walls. They rejected their Father as an
enemy and embraced their enemies as friends.
But God did not abandon them, nor did He abandon hope that they would
return to the family. And when the
bottle of time was full He sent forth His son, born of woman.

I will talk
about this unique Son of God more in future sermons and Bible studies. For now let it suffice to say He is the word
we find in the first chapter of John’s Gospel. He always was, always is, and always
will be THE GOD. And, while never giving
up His full Divinity, He added flesh to Himself and became fully human, born of
woman.

Today I want to emphasise
why God did that, why He became a human and was born in a cattle shed and died
on a cross. He did it for love, a
Father’s love for His children. Most of
you have read Laura Ingalls’ “Little House” books, or have seen the TV
programs. You remember the story of the
blizzard. Laura and Mary were walking
home from school when they were engulfed in a sudden and terrifying
blizzard. As the snow and wind increased
they were unable to see the way home. They
were lost and afraid, and rapidly freezing to death. What did their father do? He put on his coat and went out into the very
teeth of the storm. He searched and called and called and searched until he
found his daughters and took them to safety.
It almost killed him. There was
very little life left in him when, exhausted and frozen, he got the girls to a
warm house. Why did he do it? Love.
He loved his daughters more than he loved himself. He valued their lives more than he valued his
own. He would gladly sacrifice his own
life to save theirs.

That’s a pretty
good illustration of why Christ came to earth.
God loves His children, but they are lost and dying in the blizzard. He came to take us safely home. “When the fulness of the time was come, God
sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that
were under the law.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost. Amen.

A Prayer for Biblical Understanding

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given to us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

About Me

The Rt. Rev. R. Dennis Campbell is Bishop of the Anglican Orthodox Church Diocese of Virginia, and Rector of Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church in Powhatan, Virginia. He is the author of two books, He Shall Reign, and Gotta Run, and holds degrees from Southwest Baptist University, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.